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The day
dawned bright and clear, full of promise for a successful
launch to come. This was not to be any small, insignificant little launch. It was to be the second demonstration launch for the WAEC. Weeks earlier, I had stirred up interest in such a launch, and invited a few people. But on launch day, the phone was ringing off the hook (or so it seemed) with people that were interested. By scheduled launch time (11:00 a.m.) twelve guests had shown up, plus my sister Bethany's boyfriend at the time (who was spending the weekend at our house) and four in my family (including me), which made a total of seventeen people who attended the launch. When we were certain that everyone that would arrive had, I handed out the various things for people to carry, and we migrated to the WAEC Space Harbor. When we reached there, we found that some people were there playing soccer, but we were able to get them to move south a little ways, which gave us enough room to launch. The Chamberlains, an entire family that came and represented five of the twelve guests, also brought some of their own rockets. While I had the huge PVC pad set up, they assembled the relatively tiny Estes Porta-Pad, and fired off their own rockets as "fillers" between the ones I flew. I didn't keep track of their launches. The first launch of one of my rockets for the year of the Space Odyssey was the immortal SAM-66. The payload was two classic Lego spacemen, that I dubbed "David Bowman" and "Frank Poole". The flight was on an A8-3, just to serve as an opener for the event. For the first time ever, I allowed someone else to push the launch button for one of my custom-built rockets. Next I flew my clone of the simple Centuri rocket Two-Bitz. It landed ten meters from the pad. When I picked it up, I immediately realized that the ejection charge had somehow burned a hole in the side of the rocket. This damage shouldn't be hard to fix, because it would be a rather simple model to splice in a piece of the skin from another printout of the body sheet. I next flew Silver, the pre-built Estes rocket Ninja painted to look like a rocketship. The original paint pattern had been red, but I wanted the Ninja to look like the rocketship Luna in the film Destination Moon. Our next rocket to fly for the day was Mini-Bomarc, a not fully complete clone of the Estes kit. For a few years in the 70's and 80's, Estes produced a model rocket version of the Bomarc cruise missile powered by mini engines. I had first started building this kit in the summer of 1998, and finally almost finished it two years later. Estes marketed the kit with Canadian maple leaf decals, but after repeated attempts to make decals for it with our printer, I decided to just forget about it for the time being and fly the rocket on its maiden flight without decals. Mini-Bomarc took off without a hitch, corkscrewing to apogee because of misaligned ramjet tubes. At the apex of its first flight, the parachute deployed, and the rocket came down spinning. Peter Chamberlain, one of the guests at our launch, reached out his hand and grabbed the rocket from the air, not having to move from the spot where he was standing. Launch operations were nearing an end, so I decided to refly SAM-66, this time in two-stage configuration, burning a B6-0 booster and an A8-5 sustainer. SAM-66 leapt off the pad, streaking upwards first on the B6-0, and later on the A8-5. However, when sustainer burned out and the ejection charge fired, nothing happened. The Soviet Surface-to-Air Missile missile missed the U-2, and nosed over into the ground. SAM-66 arced over the field, and rammed into the ground, narrowly missing the sidewalk. The body tube of the payload section had unwound, the nose cone was lost, but the back portion, which was the original SAM-66 unit, and Lego astronauts Frank Poole and David Bowman had somehow survived. At first I was mystified as to how SAM-66 could have performed so beautifully on its past two flights, then made such a terrible plunge for the worst. Then I realized that the ambient temperature was much warmer on the January 7 launch than the one on New Year's Eve. The extra heat caused the payload coupler to expand, which made it stay firmly attached in place, despite the ejection charge's best efforts. After picking picking up all of the pieces I could find (the very front nose cone was gone forever), I took them back to the launch site and fired off one last rocket: Leviathan, on a D12-3. The rocket tore the sky apart and left my audience in a mild state of awe. The parachute deployed but didn't unfurl, and Leviathan landed on its fins. All of the fins stayed in place, however, because of their strong construction. I went home happy. |
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